'Double Fine Adventure' game's pledge drive ends at £2 million

Double Fine Adventure, a fan-funded game to be
developed by San Francisco-based Double Fine, finished its 30-day pledge drive with a record-breaking
$3,335,265 (£2 million) in donations.

The developer turned to crowd-funding site Kickstarter to finance an all-new
point-and-click adventure. It argued that traditional publishers
baulked at the idea of backing a game in the financially-risky
genre.

The project will be headed up by Tim Schafer (who made adventure
games like Day of the Tentacle and Grim
Fandango), with help from Ron Gilbert (creator of cult classic
Monkey Island). Backers will also get an episodic
making-of documentary from 2 Player Productions.

The team smashed its initial goal of $400,000 (£254,400) within
eight hours. It passed $1 million (£636,100) within its first day
(though missed out on being the first million-dollar Kickstarter
project to an iPhone dock). At $3.3 million, it's the biggest project in Kickstarter's history and enticed 87,138
backers to hand over their cash.

With the extra money Double Fine will expand the scope and
ambition of the point-and-click adventure, and will pull in more
people to work on the game. The project has also been expanded to
include English voice over; support for Mac, Linux, iOS and
Android; and translations into French, Italian, German, and
Spanish.

Double Fine Adventure (a tentative title, by the way --
exact details of the game's plot, theme and style have been kept
secret) wasn't the first game to get funded through fans. Other
Kickstarter success stories include riotous indie platformer No Time To Explain, sci-fi iPhone game Star Command and Sundance Film Festival-winner Indie Game: The Movie.

But Double Fine's unprecedented success has led to an up-swell
of new projects. Cipher Prime's trying to get a sequel to Auditorium (but it's not looking hot) and game developer
Brian Fargo wants to fund a sequel to 80s RPG Wasteland.
He's asking for a lot -- $900,000 (£570,000) -- but his studio has
already raised more than half of that, in less than 24 hours.

Elsewhere, physics-led puzzler Pixel Sand was flat-lining for almost a month on
Kickstarter. That was, until Double Fine appeared and donations to
Pixel Sand more than doubled. The game has now met its funding goal.

So is this the end of the traditional developer-publisher
relationship? Project leader and Double Fine founder Tim Schafer
doesn't think so, but he reckons it's an empowering way to deliver
risky projects to a devoted fanbase.

In a live-streamed celebration on UStream he said, "I don't want
to say this is the end of the whole games industry as we know it --
it's not, and it's not a replacement of all publishers. But it does
mean that if you've ever been told your part a a niche market, you
can make things happen."